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Another Chicago Magazine Family Pets, August 11, 2022 EXCERPT While we gallivanted around North America, back home in Cleveland, my parents would have entrusted the care of the latest cat to one of the neighbors for the month we were away. My parents were always friendly with the neighbors, but only up to a certain point. Maybe they didn’t want to be a burden. God knows, being alive was burden enough. We were Jews and it was, in Jewish years, right after the war. After all, we were genetically tweaked to remember for a lifetime. My parents didn’t want anyone knowing our business, because who really knew what might happen next? Everything seemed calm now, sure, with your Levittowns and your GI Bills (in fact my father had gotten his BS, MS and PhD on the GI Bill, beating the quota system that limited the number of Jews at the stellar schools he attended). Sure, everyone loved us now. But the screw might turn again. Another shoe might drop. We hadn’t yet seen those horrific photographs of piles of shoes left behind by victims of the camps, but any one of those shoes could gain agency, seek its disembodied mate, and start a whole world of trouble. The Masters Review The Blue Raincoat, August 2022 EXCERPT Dream of hiking in the blue raincoat in the dense Bavarian woods with your antsy feet and then bumping into your father, very much alive again, also wearing the same blue raincoat. Talk about everything and nothing, something you haven’t been able to do since he died of breast cancer a couple years before. In the space of a dream, take the walks you have missed, name the birds you haven’t recognized since he’s been gone, resolve the family problems that have kept you from moving forward. When you awake, remember the two of you together in twin blue raincoats, and go about your business in Germany, you in the real world, your father in the ether. Pleiades Living on the Other Side of the Moon, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2022 EXCERPT Poor Pops, peeing in pain and so thin it was like his skeleton was superimposed on his skin. You went to hug him and held your breath in case you pressed too hard and he cracked or folded. I tried my best, but I wasn't a first-rate son. All he wanted when I was little was for me to go to college and be a rich businessman or a podiatrist, something he could crow about to his poker pals, someone to slip him a little extra cash in his declining years. I let him down, and just between you and me, he didn't miss a chance to let me know it. Hypertext Magazine Pinch My Heart, Fall/Winter 2020 EXCERPT You live in a small town in the middle of America. You grew up in the Baptist church, a thrummy, hummy sort of place, where the preacher rocks up and down on his heels and picks his way through each sermon in nuanced cadences, pushing shopping carts full of enunciated twelve-dollar words through motifs and metaphors that wind their way through the hills and dales of the gospel. He has the power of the Holy Spirit. Parishioners come in calm and leave all revved up. You develop receptor sites for the Word of Jesus, you see Him everywhere, in a beautiful sunrise, in a baby’s first smile, in the cute little rabbits that frolic across the garden in the spring. There is no place in your world for doubt or fellowship with anyone outside the church, including an eighteen-year-old college boy named Jed. |